Retired Professor of History and Black Church Studies and
author of “Black Preaching,” Henry H.
Mitchell, had been charged with “teaching Black Church history like it’s your
own family album.” Mitchell admitted to the charge, adding that he had also written
to raise the esteem of his Black people.
Nevertheless, Mitchell also has some good things to say
about the White Church and their role in Reconstruction:
·
After the South was opened up to the
missionaries, under protection of military occupation, the Protestant churches
of the North launched a veritable crusade to bring literacy to the huge host of
the newly freed. (Mitchell, Black Church Beginnings, 142)
Well, how great was this crusade? Mitchell investigated the
annual reports of the American Baptist Home Mission Society (ABHMS):
·
I was stunned to see whole pages of names of
people who had been sent south to do mission work. There were hundreds of these
names, in tiny print, on page after page. (142)
·
Regardless of paternalism and hazards to African
American self-esteem, it was this huge crew of volunteer and minimally paid
instructors, of not just Baptist but all denominations, who laid the foundation
for all the secondary and college work reported in the pages that follow. There
may have been only a log cabin church to teach in at first; it may have been by
firelight, but these volunteers taught their very hearts out. There simply isn’t
room to begin to cover the host of primary reading classes that were begun in
churches and elsewhere soon after the Union troops took over. (142-43)
Mitchell later lists a vast multitude of schools started by
these White missionaries to train Black teachers, who gradually took their
place:
·
There were, of course, some educated African
Americans from the North hastening south to lift their sisters and brothers.
But this vast number of newly freed African Americans required this white host
at the outset… The first Southern generation of locally educated African
American instructors was first trained in schools planted by white
missionaries. (143)
Why am I writing about this? Well, for one thing, I was
thrilled to read about this. I had been so tormented reading about how White Christians
had failed their Black brethren during segregation. Reading about
Reconstruction was a welcome relief.
This is certainly not because I am White and want to build
my own self-esteem. Not at all! I am not White. Instead, I believe in the
Church that Christ has purchased with His own blood and I rejoice when I see
indications that our Lord still inhabits His people, and that this makes all
the difference in the world.
Just the other day, a Black women solemnly informed me, “Whites
do not love Blacks.” This perception needs to be countered.
I also do not want White Christians to carry undo guilt and
to allow this false guilt to either silence them or to lead them into doing
foolish things in a vain attempt to atone for their “sins.”
False guilt helps no one. As a panelist at a conference on
racism, Professor Shelby Steele was asked what an ideal America would look
like. He writes:
·
I said that what I wanted most for America was
an end to white guilt... the terror of being seen as racist— [the] terror that
has caused whites to act guiltily toward minorities even when they feel no
actual guilt. My point was that this terror— and the lust it has inspired in
whites to show themselves innocent of racism— has spawned a new white
paternalism toward minorities since the 1960s that, among other things, has
damaged the black family more profoundly than segregation ever did. I also
pleaded especially for an end to the condescension of affirmative action... the
benevolent paternalism of white guilt, I said, had injured the self- esteem, if
not the souls, of minorities in ways that the malevolent paternalism of white
racism never had. Post- 1960s welfare policies, the proliferation of “identity
politics” and group preferences, and all the grandiose social interventions of
the War on Poverty and the Great Society— all this was meant to redeem the
nation from its bigoted past, but paradoxically, it also invited minorities to
make an identity and a politics out of grievance and inferiority... their
entitlement and that protest politics was the best way to cash in on that
entitlement. (Shame: How America's Past
Sins have Polarized the Country)
Steele believes that white guilt is now more destructive to
the Black community than white racism. He argues that the very programs
intended to help Blacks were not simply ineffective but actually damaged the
Black community:
·
White guilt was a smothering and distracting
kindness that enmeshed minorities more in the struggle for white redemption
than in their own struggle to develop as individuals capable of competing with
all others.
However, even more than this, I want to see the different
races reconciled together as one in the Body of Christ. I want to remind my
Black brethren that they are beloved, even though the White Church has often failed
to show it in helpful ways that might result in healing and forgiveness.
Oneness in Christ was Jesus’ prayer (John 17:20-23). It
should also be ours.
